Sully’s session with Ryan the day before had gone well. She hadn’t stormed out or threatened to hurl projectiles. She had, in fact, seemed ready to face her pain.
So why was he pacing around his office like a kid with ADHD? Sully stopped, his hand in the mini-sandbox, and sifted its contents through his fingers. Porphyria would say he needed to settle down and do some self-therapy. If she could talk to him right now.
Winnie had called Sunday to report that the pacemaker replacement was a success, but the doctor wanted to keep Porphyria in the hospital until he was sure it was working properly. It was just routine. Porphyria had already been hospitalized for sixteen days. Insurance companies didn’t let you do that for “routine.” Nor was it routine for his energetic mentor to be sleeping every time he called.
Sully forced himself to flop into a chair and stack his ankles on the desk. He was out of Frappuccinos. That wasn’t routine either. And he couldn’t blame it on Ryan Coe or his beloved Porphyria. It was this Belinda Cox thing.
Knowing her alias was Zahira and that she was “ministering” somewhere in Mesilla left him not much further than he’d been before Sarah’s call. He’d prayed for clear guidance. He knew better than to proceed before he got it. How many times had he told a client: “If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything yet.” Holy crow. He hated his own advice sometimes.
In an effort to think about something else, Sully reached for Carla Korman’s file on his desk. He had to agree with the sticky note Martha had put on it: there was nothing in her background at Healing Choice or elsewhere to indicate that she would do the kinds of things people had complained of. Even the complainants couldn’t indicate it, because not one of them was reachable. He’d talked to Rusty Huff about it, but he couldn’t give Sully any more information than they already had.
Sully picked up his recorder. “Now I know why I didn’t become a private detective instead of a therapist,” he said into it. “I stink at it.”
Kyle stuck his head in Sully’s open doorway. “You still playing with that dinosaur?”
“I’m pretty much hopeless.”
“Do you have dinner plans?”
Sully let a grin slide across his face as he dropped the recorder into his pocket. “Ethiopian food?”
“Nah. I’ve got someplace else in mind.”
“Then you’re on.”
When Sully met him in his office, Kyle was simultaneously turning off his computer and sliding his arms into the sleeves of his jacket. Sully hadn’t been in there since Kyle had moved in, and he liked its inviting look—rugs and lamps and sepia photos. In one a striking young woman looked out from the frame, hair blown back from a face that was all smile and bright eyes and personality.
“Pretty lady,” Sully said. “Girlfriend?”
Kyle looked at the photo as if the young woman could see him loving her with his eyes, and shook his head. “That’s Hayley. My wife. You all set?”
“Depends what you’re going to subject me to,” Sully said. He decided to postpone the questions that crowded in.
They both folded themselves into Kyle’s Mini Cooper, which, Sully pointed out as they headed down Union, had a loose fan belt.
“I know. I haven’t had a chance to have it fixed. I understand you’re pretty handy under the hood.”
“I hung up my wrenches about a year and a half ago,” Sully said. “Okay, the suspense is killing me. What thing I can’t pronounce am I going to have to eat?”
“Man, the surprise is the best part.”
Sully was surprised when they sat down in a new steakhouse whose menu boasted nothing more exotic than a fried olive appetizer.
“What, no sushi?” Sully said. “No Asian duck quesadilla or some dang thing?”
“I already gave up on you,” Kyle said.
When they’d ordered rib eyes and an order of the olives, Sully was ready to get to his questions, but Kyle dove in first.
“You know I’ve listened to your podcasts, read all your books.”
“You mentioned that.” More than once, to the point of overkill.
“It makes me feel like I know more about you than I do—you’re that transparent with your work. But I realized I don’t know anything about, say, your family.”
“I could say the same thing about you.” Sully cocked an eyebrow at him. “For instance, you’re married?”
Kyle kept his eyes on the martini glass full of olives that their trim, raven-haired server set on the table. When she was gone, he smiled the same smile he’d given the photograph on his desk.
“I was married. It’s still hard to think of myself any other way.” Ouch. “Divorce?” Sully said.
“No. Hayley died in an accident eighteen months ago.”
“Oh, man, I am so sorry.”
“Yeah, thanks. It was a pretty tough shot.”
Sully wiped his hands on his napkin. “You’re doing great for being only a year and a half out.”
“I have my moments. Thank God for himself, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without the Lord.” Kyle toyed with a breaded olive. “I’m closer to him now than I ever was before—since the night I sat on the edge of the bathtub with a kitchen knife pressed against my wrist.” He left the olive in the glass and leaned back. “I told myself I just wanted to see if I could feel anything, but all I knew was pain. You might never have been that far down, but I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
Sully nodded.
“And then it was like something stopped my hand. Well, not something—I knew it was God saying, ‘I’ll take you when I want you.’” Kyle gave Sully a sheepish smile. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to put a damper on the evening.”
“No, no, it’s okay. So you got help after that.”
“From your books. Your radio show. The podcasts on suffering last year did more for me than anything.”
“That’s not meant to take the place of therapy.”
“I know. That disclaimer is all over your stuff.” Kyle’s eyes went to the server approaching with their dinners and lowered his voice. “But it worked for me, Sully. If it weren’t for you, I probably wouldn’t be here.”
Rib eyes, baked potatoes, half-ears of corn, and enough bread for a family reunion appeared. The waitress took her time getting it all on the table, slowed down by the need to chat with Kyle, smile at Kyle, all but curl up in Kyle’s lap. Sully himself was more or less invisible. He waited until after the final, hopeful, “Can I get you anything else?” before he leaned into the table.
“Look, Kyle, if you do need to talk—”
“I didn’t take this job to get free therapy. I just wanted to work with the person who taught me so much about helping people in pain.”
Kyle looked openly at Sully, eyes wet but unashamed. Sully looked back and wished Martha Fitzgerald could have heard that. Therapists could become as educated and well trained and professional as it was possible to be, and their own personal pain and recovery would still find its way into their practice. He’d tell Martha that wasn’t always a bad thing.
“You haven’t tried your steak.” Kyle cut into his and observed it critically before he said, “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
Sully sawed off a piece and chewed while he watched Kyle dig in. He was definitely young. People over forty didn’t attack a steak the way Kyle did. In spite of his loss, and his self-conscious gourmet status, he hadn’t yet learned to savor life’s flavors. But this new revelation had peeled off a layer that was older than his years.
“So what about you?” Kyle said. “Where did all your gutsy wisdom come from?” He grinned as he chewed. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
Sully grinned back and inhaled the steak and the selection of starches like he hadn’t eaten in weeks, and gave a more detailed version of his schooling in psychology at Vanderbilt under Porphyria Ghent than he shared with most people. Kyle devoured his meal, never taking his eyes from Sully while he talked, not shifting his gaze to the flirty server who came by every three minutes to check on him or letting it wander to the tray of decadent desserts she was hefting. He listened in that way only somebody who’d been there could do.
Kyle finished eating before Sully and ordered coffee and flan. Sully passed. He still had a quarter of a steak to finish.
“You’re going to get extra caramel sauce—you know that, don’t you?” Sully said when the waitress had run off happily with Kyle’s dessert order.
“Huh?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed her trying to crawl into your pocket. You could probably get a neck massage. To go.”
“Not interested. I’ve come a long way, but not that far. But speaking of pictures on desks . . .” Kyle stopped and took the coffee from the server, who now identified herself as Zoe and gave him every option for his coffee, from full-out cream to skim milk.
Sully shifted in his seat and tried to mark out a direction. It had been awhile since he’d been with a colleague who wasn’t a mentor or didn’t need one.
“I think you’re spot on,” Kyle said when Zoe was gone. “She’s making another whole trip to get the flan.”
“Don’t be surprised if she puts her phone number on the check—which, by the way, I’m picking up.”
“No way. I invited you.” Kyle sat back with his coffee and sipped in spite of the steam pouring from it.
Sully watched him and felt something give within, a thawing of ground long hardened. “The picture on my desk,” he said. “That’s my wife and baby. Was them. I still have a hard time putting them in the past tense.”
Kyle grimaced. “How long has it been?”
“Fourteen and a half years,” Sully said. “And there are times when I don’t think I’m as far along as you are.”
The flan arrived, flooded with sauce, but Kyle didn’t touch it.
“In your podcasts, the series on suffering, you never said exactly what it was you had to deal with, but I had no idea it was something that devastating. Do you mind me asking what happened?” By now Sully was unsurprised that he didn’t, in fact, mind. As Kyle listened, Sully described his thirteen years of burying his guilt and pain and anger under a career designed to heal the hurts in people’s lives when he couldn’t face the gaping wound in his own.
“You said I probably haven’t been where you were, ready to slit my wrists,” Sully said, “but I almost ran myself off a bridge. It took that for me to get the kind of help I was offering everyone else.”
“Which now makes you an even more incredible minister than you were before,” Kyle said.
“I don’t know. I took a three-month leave of absence, and when I did test the waters again, I was scared spitless. That’s when I did the podcasts.”
“But since then you’ve been incredibly productive. I mean, the speaking tour.” Kyle folded his hands behind his head. “I caught your act in Little Rock, which was where I was living at the time, and I bought the DVD Healing Choice produced when you spoke in Oklahoma City.”
Sully rearranged his silverware on the plate Zoe had yet to remove. Should he tell Kyle the underlying motive for doing those particular cities, and Amarillo? That he’d chosen them because they were places Belinda Cox had lighted before she wound up in Las Cruces?
“So are you ever going to go public with this?” Kyle asked. “Not that you necessarily should, but if people knew, I mean, think of the impact it could have.”
“The story’s not over yet.” Sully gave Kyle one more search for mere curiosity. He saw only his own former self, grasping for understanding wherever he could get it. That, and the pain he knew Kyle would never be rid of.
“I’m looking for Belinda Cox, Lynn’s so-called therapist,” he said. “She’s apparently somewhere in Mesilla, still practicing— something. I’m struggling with whether I should find her and stop her. If I even can. I’m questioning my motivation.”
Kyle pushed his untouched plate of flan aside and leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “You have to do this,” he said. “Not just for your own grief work, but for the people this woman could be keeping from getting real help. You owe them that. And Lynn and Hannah.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.” Sully put his fist to his chest. “It’s what I’m feeling, what I keep hearing from God. But I get frustrated, and I wonder if I’m getting it wrong—if I’m not just supposed to let it go.”
“I don’t think so. You probably feel that way because you’re going it alone. I’d help you, man. I’ll go to Mesilla with you and knock on doors or whatever it takes. It’s not that big a place.” Kyle sank back against the booth. “I guess I’m coming on pretty strong, but I know what you’re feeling. If there was anything I could do to make Hayley’s death mean something, I’d do it in a heartbeat. You have that chance.”
“Who wants this?” Zoe was once again at tableside, biting her lower lip at Kyle and holding up the check.
“Me,” Sully said.
She looked startled when Sully took it from her hand, as if she truly had never noticed he was there.
“Um, you can take it up front,” she said.
Sully pushed his plate away and extricated himself from the booth where, it seemed, he’d just spent several years. In spite of the ancient pain thudding dully in his chest, he had to grin to himself when he looked at the check. Zoe had written a phone number across the bottom.
Kyle had that effect on people. He made you want to trust him.
Sully could see where she was coming from.